The Carpet Mill carries a wide selection of solid and engineered hardwood floors, suitable for a variety of installation methods and environments. Hardwood remains a timeless, classic and yet contemporary hard surface, which adds tremendous value to your home.

Solid hardwood
Solid hardwood floors come in a wide range of dimensions and styles, with each plank made of solid wood and milled from a single piece of timber. Solid hardwood floors were originally used for structural purposes, being installed perpendicular to the wooden support beams of a building. Modern construction techniques now rarely use wood building frames and solid hardwood floors are used almost exclusively for their appearance.

For flooring, solid wood has many limitations due to the natural characteristics of wood. Expansion and contraction of wood from moisture and temperature fluctuation puts many dimensional restrictions on solid wood floors. Typically, 5″ wide and 3/4″ thick boards are the largest that can be manufactured from solid wood without compromising the structure of the flooring (some manufacturers produce wider boards using proprietary milling techniques). There is, however, no standard size which will perform well in every environment. For contemporary construction techniques, the most significant characteristic of solid wood floors is that they are not recommended to be installed directly over concrete.

Engineered wood flooring is composed of two or more layers of wood in the form of a plank. The top layer is the wood that is visible when the flooring is installed, and is adhered to the core which provides the stability. Often times the core of the product consist of layers of plywood, which are staggered against the grain of each other, thus contributing to increased structural stability and minimizing the potential for lateral movement.

Laminate, vinyl and veneer floors are often confused with engineered wood floors – laminate uses an image of wood on its surface, vinyl is plastic formed to look like wood, and veneer uses a thin layer of wood with a core that could be one of a number of different composite wood products (most commonly, high density fibreboard).

Engineered wood is the most common type of wood flooring used globally. North America is the only continent that has a larger solid wood market than engineered, although engineered wood is quickly catching up in market share.

It is difficult to compare in generalities solid wood floor to engineered wood floors, as there is a wide range of engineered wood floor qualities. Engineered floors typically are pre-finished more often than solid wood floors, and usually are supplied with beveled edges, affecting the appearance. There are several limitations on solid hardwood that give it a more limited scope of use: solid wood should not be installed directly over concrete, should not be installed below grade (basements) and it should not be used with radiant floor heating. Solid hardwood is also typically limited in plank width and is more prone to “gapping” (excessive space between planks), “crowning” (convex curving upwards when humidity increases) and “cupping” (a concave or “dished” appearance of the plank, with the height of the plank along its longer edges being higher than the centre) with increased plank size.

Solid wood products, on average, have a substantially, or slightly, thicker ‘sandable surface’ (the wood that is above the tongue), and can be installed using nails. Lastly, solid wood tends to be less expensive than engineered wood, but this, as with the thickness of the ‘sandable surface,’ depends on the quality of the engineered wood (most inexpensive engineered wood products are ‘veneer’ wood floors, and not ‘engineered’). In many installations, however, engineered flooring can only withstand a limited number of sandings, versus solid wood, which can be sanded many times.

Engineered wood flooring has several benefits over solid wood, beyond dimensional stability and universal use. Patented installation systems (such as “unilin” or “fiboloc”) allow for faster installation and easy replacement of boards. Engineered wood also allows a ‘floating’ installation (where the planks are not fastened to the floor below or to each other), further increasing ease of repair and reducing installation time.

In general engineered wood panels are longer and wider than solid planks. The top surfaces of solid and engineered flooring have the same properties of hardness and durability. The development of “structural” engineered flooring now means engineered floors (often with 1/4 inch lamellas and birch ply backing) can be nailed directly over joists without the need for plywood sub-flooring.

Wood can be manufactured with a variety of different installation systems:

1. Tongue-and-groove: One side and one end of the plank have a groove; the other side and end have a tongue (protruding wood along an edge’s center). The tongue and groove fit snugly together, thus joining or aligning the planks, and are not visible once joined. Tongue-and-groove flooring can be installed by glue-down (both engineered and solid), floating (mostly engineered only), or nail-down (not recommended for most engineered).
2. “Click” systems: there are a number of patented “click” systems that now exist. A “click” floor is similar to tongue-and-groove, but instead of fitting directly into the groove, the board must be angled or “tapped” in to make the curved or barbed tongue fit into the modified groove. No adhesive is used when installing a “click” floor, making board replacement easier.
3. Wood flooring can also be installed utilizing the glue-down method. This is an especially popular method for solid parquet flooring installations on concrete sub-floors. Additionally, engineered wood flooring may use the glue-down method as well. A layer of mastic is placed onto the sub-floor using a trowel similar to those used in laying ceramic tile. The wood pieces are then laid on top of the glue and hammered into place using a rubber mallet and a protected 2×4 to create a level floor. Often the parquet floor will require sanding and re-finishing after the glue-down installation method due to the small size pieces.